Curating Video-on-Demand: Silences and Interruptions by a Neo-Liberal State

Abstract

The platform phenomenon could be apprehended as an evolutionary process, one that re-institutionalises legacy market systems. This article delves into one such site of media platformisation in India that of the Video-on-Demand (VoD) market. I demonstrate this market being curated by “digital dislocations” in the legacy video business, but equally to involve and impart “digital dependencies” of various sorts in the online media economy. Rather than viewing these twin dynamics as organic developments, I explain their particular renditions in India stemming from the state’s regulatory composition of the VoD business. Here, I view regulation more broadly in terms of the silences, refractions, and interruptions of the state in the digital economy, or in short, its “digital orchestration.” While regulatory omissions testify to the VoD market being grounded in laissez-faire, the interruptions fortify the state’s own ideological and mercantile interests in and through the VoD business.